Just As I Am

In response to the daily prompt: Too big to fail: Tell us about something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail (and tell us why you haven’t tried it yet).

A large way that human beings develop and grow is through imitation and watching other people. A problem, though, is this learning-by-comparing eventually brings with it feelings of stress and inadequacy. I’m afraid I am privy to those feelings as well.

I began this exercise this morning thinking of different “things” I wanted to accomplish in my life, trying to imagine what’s holding me back from them.  I tried to imagine the most amazing and fantastical thing I could. To do that, I thought about stories I’d read, movies I’d seen, and people I’d heard of. But thinking of these only started me down a cycle of discouragement, because all of the women in the movies or in the stories I’ve heard have already done it by my age.  Also, they did it in nicer clothes, a thinner body and ended up with more money.

Ironically, something else that made this prompt challenging is that I have a hard time imagining anything I can’t do if I put my mind to it.  I have lived the truth of the proverb “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” If I’m not accomplishing something, it’s because I don’t really want it, or I don’t want it bad enough to work as hard as I would need to.

At the end of this all, I realized this : I want to be at peace with and acceptance of myself.  I don’t want to compare myself to other people. I want to know that I’m enough, just as I am. That’s what I would do if I know that I couldn’t fail. And if I put my mind to something, I can accomplish anything.